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i like how these comments are 1/3 normal comments, 1/3 people who have no idea what anarchy is, and 1/3 people who really care about how it works
If you find yourself getting real worked up about tankies or anarchists, then respectfully, go touch some fucking grass. There’s real comrades (of a variety of tendencies) out there, fighting against actual (and ascendent) fascism. Your ideological grudges are so fuckin stupid and irrelevant at this point in history. Seriously. Not. Worth. A. Fucking. Mention. Work together when you can, wish them luck when you can’t.
Pretty much spot on for the anarchists I know in real life. And seeing the reactions on this post use hundreds of words to go “nah uh!” and blame OP for sabotaging them, makes it even better.
Excellent post
i knew it!
oh. OH!!!
cooing noises!!! im gonna remember that one. oooh im gonna remember that one.
i looked it up, what it meant, what it means when an adult says they are doing it. WOW. yes. yes this - this umm…
THIS is it.
thank you for sharing.
This has nothing to say about anarchism itself. It just assumes that coercive authority would be required for industrial medicine production and large scale agriculture. Anarchism does not mean a lack of organization, just a lack of coercion and unjust hierarchy.
Whenever we organize a society big enough, it becomes susceptible to culture war and strongman leaders that reorder the society so that it’s authoritarian.
Actually teaching kids anarchist values and critical thinking skills might help, but this is why the power-mongers attack education and religious doctrine early on.
We’ve seen Marxists systems that get pretty big and work for a while, but even they have internal troubles that are resolved with political violence, and are put down by overwhelming foreign invaders (such as the United States invading Grenada).
I’m interested in anarchist theory. I’m just trying to figure out how it’s going to resist the consolidation of power, which is has been a problem for every civilization in history up to the present day.
Absolutely, but it’s still pretty funny.
So much misinformation out there, people can’t even define it anymore
well the problem is more that there’s a whole lot of high-quality crap literature about anarchism out there. so even if people do read up on it, it’s confusing.
i mean, i have seen many naive anarchists who think “everyone has a garden” and “hi, my favourite hobby is making paracetamol in my garage!” are substitutes for organized agriculture and medical manufacturing…
mostly on social media. but then again, this is a social media post too.
The vast majority of capitalists believe in the possibility of an ever expanding market on a planet with finite resources.
There have been communist who believed you should plant seeds really close together because they would have plant class solidarity and not compete with each other.
There are anarchists who think chaos is a legitimate form of government.
There are fascist.
It’s almost like naive and insane people exist within all political ideologies to different degrees.
Economies and societies are so complex that none of the models we imagine on the whiteboard are able to stay stable across centuries (or even decades).
We know, for instance, that capitalism has to be heavily regulated to prevent things like pollution, mistreatment of workers, shoddy goods and anticapitalist practices. We also know that over time, government regulators will get captured by business interests. The environment and workforce / customer base suffer, small businesses cannot compete and all the money ends up at the top with everyone else bankrupt.
So far we haven’t been able to implement any system that doesn’t degrade into authoritarianism, and eventually a one-party state with a dictator, or that doesn’t get overrun by another, more militant society intent on plundering their labor and resources.
The vast majority of capitalists believe in the possibility of an ever expanding market on a planet with finite resources.
actually that’s not true. spaceflight is explicitely researched because they understand that you can’t have an infinitely growing economy on a finite planet.
I disagree. Space exploration is mostly still done on public sector money, with the goals of national prestige, scientific advancement and as an appeal to the biological human impulse to seek out the unknown. Private endeavors are mostly focused on using space to grow the terrestrial economy (satcom megaconstellations [Even spacex and their starship is primarily being developed to serve this end]) and as investor bait (the loonie space data center rush and every such impractical startup). The noble search to conquer the cosmos is just PR for them.
I don’t deny that there’s plenty of naive anarchists around. But it’s a false conclusion that anarchism itself would be naive because of that.
You can be an anarchist and poke fun at naive interpretations of anarchism. I don’t think you have to read “all anarchists are like these hypothetical human pets” into that joke.
You don’t have to, but that is absolutely the correct interpretation when ‘anarchists’ is further qualified only by, ‘pet’, which only implies ownership. That’s even worse than calling anarchism naive. That’s implying anarchists are so dumb as to be considered pets.
To be fair, I do have a harem of pet anarchists
Call that a polycule
“Workers own the means of production” is, in fact, anarchist but I can understand freshly-minted anarchists get turned off the idea at first by tankies lol
Tankies think that the state should own the means of production. Sure, they’ll then claim that the workers own the state, but in reality it’s just owned by the political elite.
Bingo. If your hands aren’t operating the equipment on the daily, you shouldn’t get to (co)own it. Statism bleeding into work life is effectively diet capitalism.
Honest question: is political work a valid form of labor?
Theory and reality are different things, absolutely - politics is labor. Whether that’s used for good or evil is separate. Politics also =/= statism, and nothing will ever be neatly cut and dry in the real world to fully divorce ourselves from these quandaries.
Re: statism, that’s very fair, and it was what you said. I think I was partially responding to the “political elite” comment you were also responding to.
Totally agree, we can only speak certainties about real-world conditions, and the tendency toward abstraction and hypotheticals IMO is sort of a negative tendency in many ways.
I keep writing more, but I don’t wanna get way in the weeds. Def appreciate the thoughtful response
Honest personal opinion: Absolutely not.
Why not? Politics happens either way. There are going to be people who are more influential than others. name any famous anarchist, my favorite was Malatesta, and they were 100% absolutely engaged in political work.
Is it just that political work is okay until after the workers seize the means? IMO denying the necessity of political work as a means of suppressing the possibility of political domination of a minority, which is a real concern, drifts into authoritarianism almost instantly. Its just denying reality. Denying that political work is work is a political opinion. Enforcing it would be political work!
This is not a gotcha question, genuinely want to hear your opinion. I don’t think pointing out a contradiction is, on its own, a total invalidation of any given viewpoint. Contradictions are everywhere, people are contradictory.
Also that’s not my downvote, I don’t do that shi
Anarchy is more about dissolving ownership. Why would it be right to keep people out of a factory by force just because you work there?
If you have reason to believe they will cause direct or indirect harm, sure, but ownership is no indication of that. In fact production may be causing more harm than good, in which case it would be right to stop the factory’s operations, with force against the workers if necessary.
The beautiful thing about anarchism is it’s a space for hundreds of differing viewpoints (so long as they’re centered on non-hierarchical structures).
That said, I at no point mentioned force or violence in anarchist production ownership. Also where in my comment is there “keeping people out of a factory by force?” Having say over the day to day operations for the place you work is pretty typical of syndicalism, at least.
The phrase is usually used to refer to the social class of workers as a whole (the people who work to live), as opposed to the capitalist class who simply own things for their livelyhood.
I don’t want garden sized what fields I want huge community ones tended by machines made out of ganked parts running open source MCU firmware.
I’ve really had enough of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was hoping we could abandon it after the revolution.
I’ve seen a lot of garden size machines you can build essentially out of rc and 3d printer parts, hook up to a Pi and run open source software to automate things like watering and even weed plucking if you’ve got pattern recognition and cameras on the machines.
I often wonder how feasible it would be to simply scale it up to a large field. Im absolutely sure it’s done now commercially, but I’m thinking more like “it’s 5-10 years post collapse and you’re scavenging stuff to make it happen in a large field to feed 50 people”
There’s already machines for weeding. Some use lasers, quite cool. That being said, I don’t get how it would be possible in an anarchist system. How do you make the plastics, the metal parts that need high precision, or the chips and rpi?
I don’t really get anarchism. Is it about having a small utopia while still using global trade (with less international laws) and ignoring the city states growing around you with no human right or environmental regulations? How do you deal with the community upstream that poisons your river because of lazy mining?
I mean, pretty much you get a group of people together to buils/maintain/run the infrastructure because it needs done. As for the community upstream, have a nice chat and if that doesn’t work, do violence. The most important part is setting the conditions so that a self-sustaining state or similar such group capable of enacting large-scale coercion or hierarchy is difficult/impossible
Industry and anarchism are not mutually exclusive. There obviously would be very little industry left in a post-industrial, post-collapse world so I don’t think that particular example is too relevant.
Anarchism takes no stances on the scale or level of industrialization of a society. Anarchist Spain had factories. The whole anarchist federation there stemmed from workers unions. Anarchism also does not mean a lack of organization or a lack of rules the way that “anarchy” is often portrayed by the status quo. It’s just that the organization happens horizontally and without coercion.
If some place is fucking up the environment, then you organize on the regional level (delegate councils or however the system is structured) to lessen cooperation with the problematic community until they stop doing that.
Edit: If some neigbours continue to be dicks, then you can just go to war. Inb4 “Checkmate anarchists, killing fascts in the spanish civil war sounds a bit coercive!”
Most of what I’m going to say here is stuff I learned/thought about a decade ago. I went to the Porcupine Freedom Festival (Porcfest) in college, the largest libertarian get together in the US (it took over a mid-size campsite for a week). What I learned was hardcore libertarians tend to be anarchists. A lot of what I heard from others was centered around individuals being engaged in their own governance.
In one case that was a blockchain voting system where a person essentially owned their voting registration instead of getting registered with the state. The more interesting one was a presentation that put forth that the best organized groups are in sizes of eight. Therefore the best government system would be a council system in which individuals sort themselves into groups of eight, then choose one of them to be part of a group of eight groups, and so on until a country has built up a national council that directly traces each member to every individual they represent.
Based on those I think what most anarchists take issue with in our current world (of the US) is that the government comes out every four years to say “hey, here are some people to vote for, take your pick.” It’s a lot more top down than it might look on the surface, and anarchists demand a bottom up approach.
If you want an interesting portrayal of hard libertarian/anarchist ideals, I recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, which is about a libertarian revolution on the moon.
The (big L) Libertarian Party - especially those Free State Project weirdos - all but completely tainted everything to do with that scene over the past 20-ish years.
FWIW, I think you’re right. All those people who were attracted to it because it was the closest publicly acceptable thing to real anarchism, or did not even think to describe themselves as anarchists, are now largely ideologically stranded. DSA and PSL are acceptably close in ideology, but lacking in diversity and breadth of thought.
Unfortunately, that level of tolerance and openness may have been the Achilles heel allowing all those weirdos to take the reins. It honestly reeks of psyops, but could go either way. Nowadays, I avoid even the small “L” term entirely for fear of being associated with fash freaks, even when I’d be technically correct to use it.
Not gonna lie, this feels disingenuous.
It’s just political bait disguised as a “meme”.
It doesn’t even contain any good discourse about anarchism, just tired tropes of infantilisation.
Eh, why even post this?
yeah i guess that this is targeted against these low-effort “we’ll just wing it when it comes to it” anarchist takes. like, a system will obviously just work fine and run itself once that the “greedy governing classes” will put their hands off the system.
many people really put close to zero thought into how an anarchist society could function, and it shows. that’s why these kind of memes even exist. if we had actual high-quality discourse available instead of just “well, it’s just gonna work, trust me bro”, we wouldn’t have these memes.
Sorry, but I’m the interest of being brief, I’d say you’re being victim-blamey. I bet your intentions are good, but we’re taught to think in this toxic way:
“If all anarchists had good takes, {others wouldn’t attack them}.”
“If baby anarchists never spoke until fully fledged, [we wouldn’t have this problem].”
“If she didn’t buy a taser and get self defense training, <she shouldn’t dress like that>.”
Yeah, no. When someone attacks, keep your attention on the attacker.
Yeah feels like bait. Post something unfunny, tell people who point out it’s not funny that they need to lighten up and learn to take a joke. Momentarily replace feelings of emptiness with feelings of smugness and superiority.
Because anti leftist Propaganda doesnt make itself, you know?
Disagree, I think there’s something there.
Something about baby anarchists who get the spiritual lessons but stubbornly refuse to engage with the complexity of the world and try to naively derive practices straight from theory which end up laughably ineffective. In contrast, once it truly sinks in how fucked and complicated the world is and how powerless your faction is your political practice starts looking more “normal” ™️, but you harbor no ill will against the enthusiastic baby anarchists and sort of envy their lifestyle.
Might be wrong, can’t read OPs mind. But somehow it doesn’t feel mean-spirited.
I see how you could read a version of this post that wasn’t mean spirited, as you describe.
But this specific post, doesn’t do that good-will commentary that you describe.
They’re not pet-baby-anarchists, they’re pet anarchists.
The examples it’s using, are not the real problems one has, when first starting to get out of authoritarianism (inner cops we all have in us), they’re fucking production problems, which are
trivially
easy to answer and reconstruct in good faith, it just takes time to explain, because we live in nested systems of violence, and have been bullied to think that that’s reality.
This post relies on you assuming:
decentralized production is stupid,
in order to, by extension, say that
anarchists are stupid.
In this way, anyone who has suspicions about one of the two maybe being true, can be convinced that both are true.
Textbook fascistic propaganda methods, literally out of Nazi Minister of Propaganda’s playbook.
It’s using a strawman of anarchism which essentially equates it with anarcho primitivism. Those are two different things for a reason.
equates it with anarcho primitivism
Hey, it specifies solarpunk. The fellas have at least solar panels in there. And they know how to use pharamaceuticals.
I’ll grant that gathering medication in the bushes is a little on the nose.
Hey, idk, maybe the “bushes” are Psychotria viridis, and there just so happen to be some Banisteriopsis caapi vines nearby…
collecting pharmaceuticals from bushes is all fun and fine until you need insulin. turns out that a large part of today’s medicine actually comes from genetically modified organisms that grow in petri dishes and require complex set-ups to grow and be harvested successfully. good luck doing all of that in your garden.
baby anarchists
naively derive practices
laughably ineffective.
doesn’t feel mean-spirited.
🤔
It’s paternalistic, all right, but that’s something different. I have a toddler, I should know.
